Another Design Talent Is Lured Away to France

By CONSTANCE C. R. WHITE

Published: November 25, 1997

If there are any more American designers left for hire, Seventh Avenue would do well to keep them under wraps, far from the prowling eyes of international headhunters. Michael Kors is the last of a young generation of Americans snapped up by a foreign concern in less than four years. Celine, a division of LVMH Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton, announced yesterday that Mr. Kors will oversee design for Celine. His first collection will be shown at the house's fall 1998 runway show in Paris next spring.

This high-profile and widespread hijacking of American talent is unprecedented in fashion. It is part of a larger picture of international talent-poaching led by Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH, who recently reeled in a string of emerging designers to shake the dust off antiquarian European fashion names, including two Americans (Marc Jacobs, for Louis Vuitton, and Narciso Rodriguez, for Loewe) and two Britons (Alexander McQueen, for Givenchy, and John Galliano. for Christian Dior).

''Suddenly, the world of fashion is upside down,'' said Nan Legeai, the chairwoman and chief executive of Celine, who offered Mr. Kors the new post after a global search. ''The world of fashion has become international, as opposed to 10 years ago, when there was French fashion, Italian fashion, American fashion. Now, that can all be put in a pot and stirred up.''

Like the other recent hires, Mr. Kors will continue to operate his own business, which produces a luxury signature collection and a lower-priced bridge line called Kors.

The arrangement between Mr. Kors and Celine is one of the most symbiotic to date, with Mr. Kors's easily digestible clothes reflecting Celine's bias, sometimes questionable, toward wearable runway fashion.

Nevertheless, Celine is among the most profitable houses in the LVMH fashion arsenal. But businesses can never be too rich or have too much spin, and Ms. Legeai expects Mr. Kors to imbue the collection with the kind of distinctive designer image that provokes news interest.

''The basic fact of life is that women read magazines,'' Ms. Legeai said, ''and if your friendly editors think the clothes are nice but not worth putting in the magazine or on the magazine cover, then it doesn't click with the woman walking down the Ginza that this is what she wants this season.'' More than half of Celine's customers come from Asia, so it is not surprising that Ms. Legeai uses the wealthy Tokyo shopping area as her reference point.

But as Mr. Kors is fond of saying, don't look to him for any ''three-sleeve jackets.''

''What I'd like to do is take the quality they're known for, the luxury Celine is known for, and push the fashion envelope further,'' he said. ''I've always been a designer who's interested in clothes women want to wear.''

Should the media not take the bait of Mr. Kors's creativity, which can veer from brilliant American simplicity to luxurious, minimalist banality, Celine, with sales primarily from its accessories, has little to lose.

Mr. Kors would not be so lucky. The alliance will hold his work up to wider international scrutiny, and he must now operate with the fortunes of a $200 million company riding on his back. A string of bad seasons with Celine could tarnish his own collection, and his image here at home. And toiling for Celine will take time away from his own company.

At this point, Mr. Kors may have felt he had little choice but to accept the tantalizing offer from Celine. The most talented of Mr. Kors's generation -- those expected to build their own empires and thus become the financial and popular heirs to Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass and Donna Karan -- are being forced to become guns for hire.

It was not supposed to be this way. Upstarts like Mr. Kors, Mr. Jacobs, Randolph Duke, Anna Sui, Rebecca Moses, Todd Oldham, Charlotte Neuville and Isaac Mizrahi were expected to follow in the titans' footsteps. Instead, all but Mr. Mizrahi, whose business was capitalized by the Wertheimer family, which owns Chanel, have taken consulting jobs with big companies or closed their own promising businesses.

Quite simply, fashion has changed overnight.

Designer customers are not as malleable as they once were. At its best, fashion is a volatile business, as the current swings of fashion companies' share prices reflect, and starting in the late 80's, investors began shying away from more speculative -- that is, smaller -- design houses.

The more difficult customer coupled with retail consolidations have made stores a far from welcoming place for emerging designers with an individualistic approach.

''The best analogy is baseball,'' said Andrew Jassin, a partner in the Marketing Management Group in New York, which specializes in developing and finding financing for fashion companies. ''Though teams are mature and they play every day, each team has a farm team that is developing newer players. The way the retail environment is today, it's not permitting a farm team to exist.''

Mr. Kors's own business has not grown much beyond the considerable potential he showed in the 80's. In fact, he took several steps backward in 1993, when he was forced to file for bankruptcy and to discontinue his secondary line, which he reintroduced in 1996 and licensed to Onward Kashiyama. Mr. Kors was able to hammer out the licensing deal with Kashiyama when it hired him as the initial design consultant for ICB, the company's bridge collection.

He no longer works for ICB, and his arrangement with Celine specifies that he not take on any other design jobs. He will oversee Celine's ready-to-wear and also give input on advertising and accessories, roughly 80 percent of worldwide sales.

Mr. Kors creates a signature fur collection, but does not have a range of licensees. Celine could afford him entry into this area, Ms. Legeai said.

They are keeping the extent of their arrangement private, however. While Mr. Kors said that LVMH does not have an interest in his business, which he owns with John Orchulli, Ms. Legeai's response to the same query was more ambiguous. ''That's a really legal question,'' she said. ''Michael and I decided there were two labels we wanted to work on, Michael Kors and Celine. I have no problem with his business growing as long as Celine grows, too.''

Mr. Kors and his boss are going to be at pains to keep the spirits of the two houses distinct. It is not just Mr. Kors's uncluttered approach to fashion that has kept his clothes current, but his love of luxurious mediums.

When Ms. Legeai describes the Celine she sees Mr. Kors reinventing, she is careful to put some distance between the two collections. ''People have quoted Michael as being minimalist,'' she said. ''I don't like minimalism. I think it's outdated. I want from him something clean, something pure, but not simple. It's not an American design concept. It's a French design house.''

The French fashion establishment has not looked kindly on fashion designers from beyond its shores settling into the jobs of dictating French style.

Ms. Legeai, an astute businesswoman who took over Celine 10 years ago, knows better than anyone that it is not French style that is setting the global fashion agenda these days. The pain the company's image has suffered in trying to buy respect for its ready-to-wear is due in large part to its decidedly French roots. Mr. Kors would no more leave in place the matching suits and leather ball gowns that have come to define Celine than Ms. Legeai would hire a French designer to energize the line.

The truth is, Ms. Legeai could not, if she tried, have picked a more American designer than Mr. Kors to lead the house of Celine. And she is probably counting on some of this Yankee spirit, or let's call it esprit, to show up on Celine's runway next spring.